That sounds disastrous. "Whatever the ticket says" is often ambiguous, poorly-written, or just plain wrong (in terms that the request is documented incorrectly

That sounds disastrous. "Whatever the ticket says" is often ambiguous, poorly-written, or just plain wrong (in terms that the request is documented incorrectly and the requestor is not actually asking for what they want). Sometimes someone with technical inclinations gets too smart and thinks the solution is X when it is really Y. In my personal experience, it is much easier to clear this up going to the requestor itself, rather than asking a PM to clear it up. I ask them high-level questions like, "so, what is it that you really want here?" to try and suss out what the actual deliverable is. But I agree that if you have too many projects on your plate this is untenable. But then devs having too many projects on their plate is a pretty poor situation and is indicative of bad management.